Stalking Tender Prey

by Constantine, Storm

  ‘What a bunch of pussies!’ Owen said, grimacing at the school boys. ‘Prematurely middle-aged. From school to Daddy’s curse of terminal adulthood in a single step, no doubt.’ He swung the car around, dangerously close to where the group stood.

  Daniel stared at his hands, mortified. ‘We don’t all have the benefit of a private income,’ he said sourly. ‘Not everyone has the freedom you have, me included.’

  ‘True. Can’t say it bothers me particularly.’ Owen pushed a tape into the cassette deck, thus precluding further conversation. He drove recklessly through Patterham town centre, narrowly missing pedestrians. Daniel could tell Owen was in a dangerous mood. What this signified in respect of himself, he couldn’t guess. Owen had never picked him up before, so what had happened on Wednesday night must have changed things. However, there was no sign that Owen had been desperate to see Daniel. Perhaps a talk was presaged, a request to forget their brief, fumbling intimacy. That might be best, Daniel thought. He wasn’t sure he could cope with anything else, even though he yearned for it.

  Owen gave no explanation as to why he’d driven over to Patterham, although Daniel noticed some bags from music shops on the back seat, indicating Owen had been treating himself. Perhaps it was a coincidence he’d been about to go home at school closing time. Daniel took off his tie, loosened his shirt collar. He didn’t like Owen seeing him in uniform. It made him feel young and conventional.

  They drove without speaking until the countryside spread out to either side and the road climbed towards the hill tops. Then Owen said, ‘We’ll call in at yours so you can get changed.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Cresterfield. I thought we’d go to Marlene’s tonight.’

  Daniel frowned. ‘It’s a bit early, isn’t it?’ The club didn’t open until ten.

  ‘We can eat in town. I’ll treat you.’

  ‘What about the others, Ray and everyone?’

  Owen didn’t answer for a moment. ‘They’re busy tonight.’

  Daniel had never known Ray and the others to be ‘busy’, unless Owen was involved. Surely this was a good sign rather than a bad one. Owen clearly wanted to be alone with him. Daniel felt a little encouraged, though more nervous. How could they possibly speak about what had happened? It seemed like a vaguely prurient dream now.

  Little Moor appeared empty as they drove up the lane. Owen turned the car onto Low Mede’s drive. Daniel noticed him glance quickly at his own cottage before he swung the vehicle beneath a convenient screen of willow branches that drooped across the gravel. Did Lily know that Owen was here? How much did Lily know?

  ‘Be quick,’ Owen said. He leaned back in his seat and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Aren’t you coming in?’

  ‘No. Go on, then!’

  In the attic room, Daniel dressed carefully, outlined his eyes in black, messed up the hair he was not allowed to dye or grow. The house was quiet around him, not even Verity was at home. Perhaps she’d gone out with Louis. Daniel left a note on the kitchen table, paused to stroke Raven’s head, plucking up the courage to go back outside. He felt that by donning his other-life attire, he was making some kind of obvious invitation, which Owen would scorn. Presently, he heard the car horn being sounded, forcing him to leave the sanctuary of the house.

  Owen made no comment as Daniel got back into the car, pulling on a leather jacket adorned with careful paintings of band logos. They left Little Moor the way they’d come in, without passing the cottage.

  An hour’s drive later, they reached the city. Nothing had been said as loud music had filled the interior of the car the entire time. Owen parked up in a multi-storey and they went to an American restaurant nearby that served Creole food. Daniel felt out of place. He’d never eaten out with Owen before, and their clothes invoked curious glances from the staff of the restaurant. Even the fact that the early hour meant the place was nearly empty didn’t make Daniel feel any easier. Owen ate sparingly, drinking ice cold bottles of imported Mexican beer. It didn’t feel natural for them to be sitting there like a boy and girl out on a date. It felt weird. What was Owen playing at? He didn’t seem to care, sitting there, swigging beer, gazing around the place. Was this supposed to be a treat for Daniel? If so, it didn’t feel like one. Not one word was uttered about Wednesday night, neither about the meal or the events after it. Owen talked about music, the CD’s he’d bought, which bands he planned to go and see live in the near future. Was he nervous? He didn’t seem so. The conversation was normal, how he’d be with Ray and the others, on the nights when they didn’t visit the High Place, but now it seemed strained, false.

  When Daniel had finished eating — he’d been surprisingly hungry, which was a blessing considering there was nothing else to do but eat as he listened to Owen — Owen paid for the meal with a credit card. Daniel had never seen Owen use one before. Everything was strange now, different.

  ‘We’ll go to The Angus,’ said Owen. This was a pub where the local alternative types met up before going out clubbing. At seven o’clock, it too was nearly empty, but the music was blaring. Owen put some money in the juke box, then a couple of girls he was acquainted with came in and joined them. Owen introduced them to Daniel, even though he must have met them before. Cressida and Letiel, assumed names, he presumed. They all used assumed names. Both were tall and skinny, dressed in lacy black rags, with much fishnet-clad thigh and bare cleavage exposed. Cressida had thigh length scarlet plaits, Letiel an astounding mane of green hair extensions. Both were talkative and flirty. Daniel had a feeling Owen had arranged for the girls to meet them there and his heart sank. Girls were always forcing their telephone numbers on Owen, but as far as Daniel knew, he’d never made use of them before. They were enthusing about some band they’d been to see the night before, and Owen joined in with their conversation, apparently fascinated. Daniel sat at the bar, frozen with misery and confusion, ignored by the others who were standing up around him. Owen was drinking too much. How would he drive home? That he might not intend to was unbearable to think about. Daniel decided he might as well get drunk too. He asked Owen to buy him a Jack Daniels, which he thought to be a sophisticated drink. Owen gave him a ten pound note from his jacket without even looking at him.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’ Daniel asked the girls.

  They asked for vodkas, scenting affluence, and downed their half pints of cider quickly.

  Alcohol made the time pass quickly. A number of Letiel and Cressida’s friends arrived in groups of two or three, and by the time they were due to move on to Marlene’s, Owen and Daniel were in a crowd of about twenty people. Letiel had made an effort to talk to Daniel, and had been telling him about her college course in Fashion. When asked what he did, he waspishly told the truth, expecting mockery. Letiel only said, ‘I wish I’d bothered to stay on at school, now. You can’t wait to get out, can you? It’s the environment, I think. Stultifying. Still, I wasted a couple of years. It’s so much harder now. I wish I had your guts.’

  Daniel didn’t think it was necessary to have guts to obey the injunctions of his father and his sister. He was surprised by Letiel’s reaction, but perhaps she was just being kind. As they left the pub, she linked her arm through Daniel’s to walk up the road. He felt slightly drunk, at the stage when it still feels good. Perhaps a Coke was in order once they reached Marlene’s. He didn’t want to be ill.

  Letiel offered to buy him a drink, and laughed when he told her what he wanted, although not spitefully. ‘You’re very down to earth, Daniel,’ she said. ‘It’s obvious you’ve got great self control!’ She had seen him gulping down the Jack Daniels’ in The Angus, seemingly with the sole intention of becoming unconscious as quickly as possible. Owen had moved away, chatting animatedly with a few of the people they’d come in with. Daniel felt ignored. Sod him, then, he thought. If Owen wanted to play games, he could get on with it.

  ‘Have you got a girlfriend?’ Letiel asked.

  Daniel caught a glimpse of himself in the mir
ror behind the bar. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m gay.’ It had been surprisingly easy to say.

  ‘Boyfriend, then?’ Letiel continued quickly.

  Daniel thought it was significant she hadn’t asked if he was with Owen. ‘No, there was someone, but...’ He smiled fiercely, the dressing over pain, ‘he wasn’t sure what he was into. It was a bit.. difficult.’

  ‘Poor you.’

  ‘It’s OK now.’

  Letiel put a hand on his arm, smiled at him. He could feel her empathy. She too had been let down by men. How odd to find this affinity. He hadn’t thought of that.

  ‘He wasn’t bored with you,’ Daniel said. He didn’t know why he said it, the words just came out.

  Letiel looked at him. ‘Pardon?’

  Daniel shrugged, about to dismiss what he’d said, but there was more. ‘He was just a shallow, stupid fucker who fancied everything that moved. Also, he took money from you. You didn’t lose the twenty, like you thought, like he said. He took it.’

  ‘Who?’ Letiel’s voice was almost inaudible.

  ‘Con... Connor? Was it Connor?’

  Letiel nodded. Then she narrowed her eyes. ‘Who told you?’

  ‘No-one,’ Daniel said. ‘Apparently, I’m psychic.’

  Later in the evening, Daniel found himself sitting with Letiel and a couple of her friends in the shadows at the edge of the dance floor. Thick beams of coloured light roved across the gyrating bodies bewitched by the rhythm of the music. Daniel couldn’t remember how he’d moved there from the bar, even though he’d stopped drinking. Letiel dragged him to up dance a couple of times, though his heart wasn’t in it tonight. He saw Owen dancing with Cressida. She shook her head, so that her long red plaits whipped through the air. She grinned in pleasure as she twisted her slim, agile body around to the music. Owen was caught in a spotlight of red rays, his hair looked pink. He seemed to be dancing alone, Cressida a mere elemental shadow around him. How beautiful he looked. Painfully, Daniel decided he needed another drink; anything to numb the agony which was growing inside him like an infection. He didn’t want to ask Owen for money again, and managed to scrape together enough change from his pockets to buy another Jack Daniels. When he returned to his seat, Cressida came sidling up to him. He could smell her perfume and her sweat. She shuddered like a race-horse who’d just won a race. She was, he realised, stunning to look at. This did not help his mood.

  ‘Letty told me,’ she shouted in Daniel’s ear, which under the circumstances might as well have been a whisper.

  Daniel raised his hands to indicate he couldn’t hear her properly over the din of the music.

  Cressida screwed up her face, made a vexed gesture, and then dragged him to the ladies’ toilets, where the pound and thud of the music was muted. The small room, with its inadequate couple of cubicles and cracked mirror was infested with hot, perfumed bodies, both male and female, who were squeezing around the mirror to adjust their war-paint and shriek gossip at one another. Apart from a cursory glance as Daniel and Cressida pushed themselves through the noisy gathering, nobody paid them any attention. Cressida squashed Daniel up against the back wall.

  ‘You have to help me,’ she hissed in an undertone.

  ‘How?’ Daniel dreaded some awful confidence concerning Owen was about to be revealed.

  ‘Letty told me about you being psychic. It was incredible what you said to her.’ Cressida had raised her voice a little.

  ‘It doesn’t happen very often,’ said Daniel. ‘It’s not a party trick.’ He could sense he was being off-hand and short with the girl, but it didn’t seem to deter her.

  ‘There’s something I need to know.’ A few people left the room, and briefly a fist of music punched through the door.

  Daniel sighed impatiently. ‘I don’t think I can help you.’ The few people left around the mirror were now suspiciously quiet, listening.

  ‘It’s about a friend of mine,’ Cressida persisted. ‘Serafina. Perhaps you read about it?’

  Daniel shrugged, said nothing.

  ‘She was murdered,’ Cressida said. ‘It was in the papers a few weeks ago, on the news, everything. They found her body in a car park at night. You must have heard about it!’

  There was no emotional crescendo behind her words. She looked, Daniel thought, sick rather than ghoulishly fascinated. He rarely took any notice of the news, although a dim memory of the TV coverage surfaced in his mind. A picture of a white-faced girl, an image retained because it belonged to his own sub-culture ‘What do you want me to do about it?’

  ‘Can’t you look into it?’ Cressida said. ‘Can’t you help find out what happened to her?’

  Daniel held up his hands, backed towards the door. ‘No, no.’ He found he was laughing. ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘But you’re psychic!’ Cressida insisted. ‘You could help, couldn’t you?’ She pulled a silver bangle from her left wrist. ‘Here, this was hers. She gave it to me. I always wear it now.’

  Daniel looked at the offered object as if it was a poisonous insect. He didn’t want to touch it. ‘I’m not psychic in that way,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry...’

  Cressida, who was not wholly sober, grabbed Daniel’s arm and forced the bangle over his hand. ‘Take it! Please!’

  The silver burned his skin, cold even though Cressida had just taken it from her own wrist. With a wordless cry of disgust, he pulled it from his arm and threw it onto the floor. Everyone had gone very still. Bile rose in Daniel’s throat. He pushed a horde of insistent images and sensations from his mind, a sweet, sickly smell, powdery dark shadows, moving shapes, an ache behind the eyes.

  He is in the hallway of a house and everything is tilting before his eyes, as if he’s watching a badly filmed video. He is the camera, and can only see in the direction in which his tunnel vision is pointed. Daniel looks around himself; he has never had a waking vision as clear as this. There are paintings on the wall, huge Pre-Raphaelite prints, but he cannot pause to look at them. Something is drawing him onwards. Stumbling, Daniel progresses down a corridor. He knows he is getting closer to the thing he’s been brought here to see. A vibration is building up — within himself and within the walls of the house. The light is strange; no colour at all.

  He comes upon a dark room. There is a sweet, sickly smell and a sense of dark shapes writhing around in a warm fog. Daniel’s eyes hurt so much, it feels as if all his tears have evaporated, the ducts withered, and no matter how much he tries to blink, he can’t make the bathing fluid flow. His eyeballs are searing. Fear grips his body and his mind. His senses are aware of something too hideous to be borne. Unable to prevent himself, he looks up and sees it: a swirling, lightless void churning above the heads of everyone present. From this black hole emanates the most inexpressible evil and hunger. Daniel cannot bear to look at it for long, and forces his camera vision downwards. Before him, he sees the white body of a girl, naked upon some kind of table. A huge black figure leans over her — a man, who is familiar yet a stranger. As Daniel watches, he can see the etheric body of the girl rising up out of her flesh. Her soul is being drawn up into the void. In the moment before she is engulfed, she seems to become aware of Daniel as another astral form. For one terrible moment, she looks at him. She cannot speak, but her eyes are crying, ‘Help me!’ He can do nothing. She is drawn up, devoured. An unearthly roar pervades the room and Daniel’s mind. He knows that the void is consuming everyone around him. He cannot see for the smoke, cannot hear for the screaming. Terror is a real presence around him. From his own throat comes a long, desperate wail…

  Daniel realised he was kneeling on the floor of the ladies’ room, in a night club in Cresterfield, his arms clutching his stomach. Cressida and some of the others were leaning over him, their arms a hesitant feathery protection around his shoulders. ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Do you want anything?’

  ‘She wanted him to do it,’ Daniel said, searching for Cressida’s eyes in the throng. He could not recognise faces at that point, only eyes. He foun
d her exotic make-up, her cats’ eyes, staring wildly at him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s true. It was part of it, the power, the... I don’t know, can’t interpret. She knew him. She loved him. He was a god, a man... no. I don’t know.’ He felt very weak, reality settled around him, everything becoming normal once more. He wanted Owen. He needed to tell him about this.

  ‘You saw them?’ Cressida murmured, coaxing.

  He nodded, then shook his head. Part of the strangeness of what had happened was that there were no words in any human language to describe what he’d felt, seen, smelled and heard. It was impossible to articulate, for it was beyond this reality, beyond life. An otherness. ‘There is something else,’ he said to Cressida. ‘Something else in this world. Here all the time. Here now.’ He had begun to shiver.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Cressida answered. ‘What something?’

  ‘I can’t tell you. No words. They don’t exist.’

  Cressida helped him to his feet. ‘I’m sorry, Daniel. I’m a complete cow! I’m really sorry.’ She hugged him to her, to her salty-musk animal scent of races won.

  Everyone stared at the silver bangle on the floor, but no-one would pick it up. Daniel said, ‘I have a name. Shem... Shem-yah-zah.’

  ‘Who? The murderer?’

  Daniel shuddered violently. He thought he was going to vomit, but the feeling passed abruptly. ‘A name. That’s all.’

  ‘It could be a place, or anything,’ someone suggested.

  A girl said, ‘Are you going to tell someone about this? You know, the police, or something?’

  ‘No!’ Daniel said. ‘I couldn’t go through that.’

  ‘You could send an anonymous note, or a phone call.’ This came from a boy who looked at least three years younger than Daniel, his face plastered in black and white makeup.